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Stopping Bathers

November 2, 2017 by Belghast

I stayed up way the hell too late last night and I am going to pay for it today. Funny how knowing this is going to happen, doesn’t actually prevent it from happening over and over again. Yesterday was the day that the Leviathan raid opened for PC players and in a very impromptu manner we scraped together a raid out of six people who were 270 or better geared that happened to be around. The group we went in with: Tamrielo, Thalen, Phorsaken, Lleandryn, Muspel and of course me. So 1 Titan, 2 Hunters, and 3 Warlocks… what is with our clan and the proclivity for the “caster” archetype? We are odd ducks when it comes to raid content. In this era of Fat Boss and MTQ Capture… generally speaking we prefer to go in completely blind. While I have seen random tidbits here and there about the Leviathan raid… I had purposefully avoided any strategies in the thought that maybe just maybe Destiny 2 on PC might gain some traction and I could get folks interested in attempting the raid. We fairly quickly sorted out the banner mechanic for the first area, and then proceeded with attempting to learn the Royal Baths encounter. The biggest problem facing us last night was the fact we did not start until it was already very late for us East and Central players. We did however work on a seeming answer to how to get through the encounter, and in theory it will just involve us properly executing on the plan… something I was not capable of doing last night after about 11 pm.

As far as the night as a whole… there were many attempts made at the Nightfall. This one is considerably worse than last week mostly because of the prism modifier and always seeming to be dead when I could be doing the maximum amount of damage to things. For the first two attempts I was running a less than successful combination of dual auto rifles, and wound up swapping things up a bit to the Manannan Void Scout Rifle as my energy weapon and Merciless as my fire Power Weapon. The challenge I kept having was in sections where I really could not get close to the targets and they were hanging back at a range where the autos were just not that effective. We managed to get the kill and the items gained from the Nightfall and the first chest of the raid managed to push me up to 287 power level. I am thinking that it might be time to start doing the various exotic quests so that I can push up weapons from infusing the items I am going to get. I will absolutely funnel the MIDA Multi Tool into my Manannan and the Mini Tool into my Antiope-D. So technically we have not actually cleared much in the raid, but we have a game plan and the intent to come back Friday night and give it another shot. I at least hope that our gameplan is in fact the one that is going to work going forward, because we managed to get to a burn phase… just got killed by the adds while trying to do this thing. Hopefully we can smooth out the rough spots and get a win, and move forward in the Leviathan. Side note… please do not post strategies because I know the desire to say “you only need to do this” is going to be strong. We legitimately prefer to figure this shit out on our own. It is always a challenge to find a team willing to wipe for science.

November 2017 Gaming Goals

November 1, 2017 by Grace

What is it about getting older that makes the months seem to go by in a blur? Probably the lack of sleep from playing too many games. Anyway it’s time to review my October goals and make some new ones for November.

October Goals in Review:

WoW: Level either my warrior or my horde monk to 60. Done! I did even better and got my warrior to 100 and got her artifact.

Get at least one more of the concordance pet/mount/toy rewards I’m missing. Done! I think I actually have all of the concordance rewards now, unless there’s one for warriors that I’m not aware of.

D3: Master the last Necromancer set dungeon. Nope. I didn’t get much D3 time in this month at all.

Legendary: Get a maxed-star card of every color. Done!

Destiny 2: Hit the level cap. Done!

November Goals:

WoW: Get the warrior to 110. This should be reasonable to do in a weekend, especially if I can catch some invasions and/or the darkmoon faire. Once I get her class mount I can call Legion “finished” as far as I’m concerned.

Destiny 2: Try the raid. I’m having a blast in D2 so far and I want to capitalize on the fact that so many of my friends are playing right now too. I still have no illusions about being hardcore or good at this game, but I’d like to at least see what a raid in Destiny looks like.

Diablo 3: Finish the last Necromancer set mastery I’m missing. I really do want to knock this out and put set dungeons behind me forever (until new classes or sets come along anyway).

Complete the baseline chapters of the Season 12 journey. I’m not really feeling D3 much right now but a new season starts soon and I want to try to get the cosmetic goodies during the initial rush like I usually do. There’s new wings this season and I don’t want to miss out on them!

That’s a very modest list for November, hopefully that will set me up for success!

Crucible Is A Mess

November 1, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve had a series of nights that did not go exactly as plan, and last night was no difference. I had a useless and impromptu 4pm meeting which lead me to get out of work significantly later then planned, and a series of errands that needed to be tacked on before I hit the house. By the time I actually hit the computer I was already stepping into turtle mode and largely stayed there the rest of the night. This did however give me the opportunity to work on the weekly milestones for both my Titan and Hunter. As has been my plan for a bit, I chose to do them in reverse order of importance to me… starting with the Hunter and finishing with the Titan and it seems to have had the desired effect. As of yesterday I could hit 275 on the Titan and as of last nights shenanigans I managed to push the Hunter to 281 and the Titan subsequently to 283. I still have Nightfalls to do on both of them and I am hoping tonight I will feel up to group interaction and attempt to get those knocked out as well. From there it is a matter of getting the Warlock up and running and geared enough to start knocking the content out as well. The sticking point right now is the fact that I am significantly worse in the crucible than I was on the console.

Essentially whatever I had learned on the console seems to need unlearning… and instead I am having to adapt to an entirely new set of circumstances. I am improving, but every so slowly and one of the aspects that does not help is the horrific queuing mechanism present in Destiny 2. Firstly there is still the problem of 4v4 being a worse mode than 6v6 for a bunch of reasons not the least of which is… if you are not roaming with the pack you are dead. In 6v6 there were lots of sub groups that would break off from the main group and roam the map in twos and threes… but in 4v4 you tend to either encounter no one… or a murderball that is the entirety of the enemy team roaming around together. This is only made worse by the fact that you are constantly being presented with teams of four players from the same clan. In 6v6 queuing with one or two members of your clan was largely diluted by the fact that there were 3 or 4 other people on the team. Queuing as a pair… means you now represent half of the team and it greatly skews the end results. I feel like the grouping routing should in theory favor placing solo players with other solo players… and full teams against other full teams. However because of the constant complaining in Destiny 1 we have a system that favors connection speed over literally everything else and ends up throwing a monkey wrench in any semblance of proper queuing mechanics.

I realize the intent was to have Quick Play be a casual queue and Competitive be a more serious one… but that does not appear to be working. Competitive modes would be fine for full team vs full team interactions, or for e-sports tournament settings. However as a casual player they are miserable just because you are committing to an indefinite amount of time per match. I know that when I enter the quick play queue I am agreeing to something in the range of 8-10 minutes of my time. With competitive this is entirely variable based on how many matches you have to play to reach the objectives of the mode… which are not even really clear in my head. One mode seems to be that you have to win 6 out of 10 matches to move get on with your life, and the other seems to be a slightly lower number. Regardless unless you are just straight up throwing each match you are stuck there for thirty minutes. I’ve played competitive exactly 2 times per character to unlock the Call to Arms milestone and never looked back. I am hoping with the advent of season 2… we see some significant changes in the way the queue system works because right now the crucible is not fun at all and something I suffer through each week to get gear. If you removed the powerful rewards… I would probably never play crucible again other than Iron Banner… and even then it is still a gear chase and not something I actually enjoy playing. I have proven time and time again over the years that I am willing to suffer some serious bullshit for the minor prize of seeing a single number go up a few digits.

And Then There Were Two

October 31, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not quite work out entirely as intended. My hope was to get home and do a flurry of activities quickly in order to get my hunter Nightfall ready. This did not happen because I came home to a whole slew of other things that needed to be taken care of immediately. Then when my wife got home she realized that she had not stopped by the store to get Halloween candy for her classes, and I threw proper clothing back on and ventured out into the cold once more so she could get on with her lesson planning and grading. All of this mean’t that I did not even get a proper start to the evening until around 7:30 last night… which also meant there was no way there were enough hours to accomplish all of the things that I wanted to be doing. I bowed out of Nightfall shenanigans and instead focused on knocking out the milestones needed to unlock a second set of luminous engrams. The most tedious of these was the crucible, because not only did I need to do enough to get the Call of Arms… but I had yet to do the pvp required to even unlock it. Note to self… in the future do this as part of the leveling experience so you don’t have to burn through it when you finish 20 and complete the story. I cannot fully express how much I loathe “competitive mode” crucible playlist and I am continuing my track record of playing it exactly two times on each character to unlock the milestone.

From there it was grinding the Crucible and I still am not in a position where I function well in this mode on PC. The dynamics all feel vastly different and I wound up hooking up a controller to see if the aim assist would help. Turns out it did… and apparently I just cannot track erratic PVP targets with the mouse as I could with the controller. Either that or I simply need to rely on the crutch that is aim assistance. Regardless I am super happy with the way Destiny 2 PC feels with a controller and how easy it is to swap back and forth between the two modes. Effectively to start using the controller you just pick it up and hit a button on it, and then to switch back you just click a button on your mouse. So often on the PC you need to choose one or the other and it has to be toggled back and forth via some nested menu structure. Here you can so easily swap back and forth that it feels completely reasonable for me to simply choose to use controller with the crucible and mouse and keyboard for everything else. I am also assuming that most of the vehicle sequences are going to work much better with a controller, so I might simply start picking them up and doing that as well.

All of the last minute grind completely paid off because the extra set of luminous engrams allowed me to move my Titan’s power level ahead just a little bit. More importantly than that… I no longer need to grind Nessus because Hawthorne awarded me a 282 Uriel’s Gift… one of those weapons I had been desperately trying to get back. This means I once again have my crucible setup of choice in the form of Antiope-D, Uriel’s Gift and Hawthorne’s Field-Forged Shot Gun. There are still a bunch of weapons I am missing that I want to try and get, but unfortunately the two I am missing the most are both on the Crucible loot table. Here is hoping the next round of luminous engrams sees me getting a Better Devils and a Play of the Game, so that I don’t have to grind out faction tokens to get them that way. The nightfall this time is Arm’s Dealer again but with Prism… meaning that there will be a rotating buff and matching the damage type increases damage output… and not matching it lowers it. Additionally we have Killing Time as a modifier meaning every mob killed slowly adds time back to the timer. It should be interesting and way more challenging than last weeks grenade fest. In theory I will be trying to get the Nightfall on two characters from this point out, so hopefully folks really get into it. So far they seem to be enjoying it quite a bit because while I was doing my grindy bits there were Nightfall groups attempting to get it for various folks. This week also sets up a new goal… getting the Warlock leveled and through all of this content so she can start adding to the luminous bonanza as well.